251–260 of 794 posts
"Fun" times for services selling micro-VMs running on top of Hetzner bare metal machines for a small margin. 3x increase in input pricing with essentially no notice (there was a 2 weeks notice of "we will change pricing" but no details. People assumed a max of 50% increase, I guess, not 3x)
Although I did plan for OVH-level dedicated server prices, so as long as they don't jack up prices too I'll be fine...
This is just the reality of hardware costs now. RAM and Disk are scarce, prices have skyrocketed. I wonder how much leverage the hyperscalers like AWS/GCP/Azure have on their own supply chain to keep costs level in their clouds.
This is the real risk after the slow death of personal computing. Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only ones who can afford to order years of compute hardware in advance. I’ve already started buying cheap old business PCs just in case I’ll ever need to have simple barebones machines to run things on.
By the time you can have a slow death of personal computing, capacity will improve and prices will improve.
In the shorter term sitting on an old computer or regressing a couple years on specs or paying an extra $100/$200 for 8GB/16GB works.
> Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only ones who can afford to order years of compute hardware in advance.
I don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases.
For some average business paying a week's wages for the computer you use, they can afford that doubling to two weeks just fine.
For all the normal server rental companies, okay the guy on the $10 plan either pays $16 now or cuts their resource allocation and keeps paying $10. That's not going to cause a sea change. And higher end hosting isn't that much different.
The last price increase was 5-10%. This one is a 150% increase. Goodbye Hetzner. The old version of you will be missed.
This is just the reality of hardware costs now. RAM and Disk are scarce, prices have skyrocketed. I wonder how much leverage the hyperscalers like AWS/GCP/Azure have on their own supply chain to keep costs level in their clouds.
Inching closer to Vultr prices. There are some Rails projects I might have later this year, and I had already been thinking of putting them onto Vultr via Hatchbox since Vultr offered a managed db. Maybe for some stuff that I can run a Rails 8 Solid Stack app with just sqlite, I'd use Hetzner. I tested both with Hatchbox but have nothing in production on either yet and generally use Heroku and Render still. Has anyon…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the real risk after the slow death of personal computing. Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only ones who can afford to order years of compute hardware in advance. I’ve already started buying cheap old business PCs just in case I’ll ever need to have simple barebones machines to run things on.
> This is the real risk after the slow death of personal computing. By the time you can have a slow death of personal computing, capacity will improve and prices will improve. In the shorter term sitting on an old computer or regressing a couple years on specs or paying an extra $100/$200 for 8GB/16GB works. > Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only ones who can affo…
It really is an absolute massive jump. Have no clue what's going on in the back to warrant a 3x increase... 25-50%, sure.. but 3x is wild.
The AI bubble has increased the prices of nand and ram by a factor of 4, so a 3x increase seems reasonable. Companies that are not big enough to have long term contracts with ram/nand vendors have been hit really, really hard by this.
This is just the reality of hardware costs now. RAM and Disk are scarce, prices have skyrocketed. I wonder how much leverage the hyperscalers like AWS/GCP/Azure have on their own supply chain to keep costs level in their clouds.
This is the real risk after the slow death of personal computing. Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only ones who can afford to order years of compute hardware in advance. I’ve already started buying cheap old business PCs just in case I’ll ever need to have simple barebones machines to run things on.
But what you see is a cautious strategy from the existing players. They are hedging against a bubble. They don’t want to pour today tens of billions of dollars in capacity that they will have to sell it to a deflated market
This is just the reality of hardware costs now. RAM and Disk are scarce, prices have skyrocketed. I wonder how much leverage the hyperscalers like AWS/GCP/Azure have on their own supply chain to keep costs level in their clouds.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And I was told my whole life that capitalism solved everything through supply and demand magic. I wish I could say I am disappointed.
I was also told this. Why isn't it happening? Can some capitalists explain why capitalism isn't happening the way it's supposed to? Is it because of government regulations, do we need to deregulate?
In this context, it takes spending enormous piles of money over the course of at least several years to spin up new semiconductor production.
We do need more capacity to keep up with AI datacenters' usage, yes.
But adding long-term capacity years down the road for a thing that some folks seem to confidently think is a bubble that can pop at any time is risky. And (because capitalism), we have to manage carefully balance our risks and rewards in order to maximize our odds of success.
If there is no bubble and demand stays high long-term, then the payoff for that risk is potentially enormous.
If there is a bubble and it bursts, then the cost of that risk is potentially devastating.
(Capitalism works most-predictably when cheating is possible, such as with Biff's use of the time machine in Back to the Future II. But without cheats, it's always a gamble.)
It really is an absolute massive jump. Have no clue what's going on in the back to warrant a 3x increase... 25-50%, sure.. but 3x is wild.
They might have had delivery contracts from before the prices increased, so they didn't have to pass them to customers. Maybe the last servers from those contracts got delivered already and any new orders need to be bought at much higher prices. Another possibility: They were growing too fast and need to slow down. At some point additional growth might become too risky, or even exponentially more expensive. It might…